Building a Winning Model

Vest Labs is building a proprietary trading firm that only profits when its traders succeed. The company's model flips the traditional retail prop trading firm structure, where traders pay fees regardless of performance. Vest takes a cut of the gains from live market trading, with traders keeping up to 95% of profits.

Traction and Growth

Vest was cofounded by Justin Ma, Rikuya Takatsu, and Maximilian Tsiang. The three are friends and University of Pennsylvania dropouts, with Ma serving as CEO. Beyond lead investor Portal Ventures, executives at Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and KKR participated in their personal capacities. The company has reported approximately 27,000 traders on its platform, with 26% receiving cash payouts in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin.

Risk Management

Vest runs its perpetual futures exchange on a real-time risk pricing engine called zkRisk. The job of a risk engine is to continuously assess how dangerous each position is, so the platform knows when exposure is getting out of hand. The choice of USDC for payouts lets Vest settle quickly and across borders, which fits a platform that operates 24 hours a day across crypto and traditional asset markets.

Expansion Plans

Vest plans to put the new capital toward three goals: building a mobile app, hiring additional staff, and expanding the range of assets available on the platform. With the backing of hybrid investors like Jane Street and Amber Group, Vest sits at the intersection of traditional finance and crypto trading, borrowing the prop trading structure from traditional finance and running it on digital-asset rails.